Tale of Two Markets

“Free markets are self-organizing, permitting the most efficient use of resources for the greatest creation of value.” —Adam Smith

Let's start by savoring the irony that
the biggest thing ever to hit business—the Internet—was the
creation of hackers working with government money. They didn't do
it for the money, and they didn't do it to make money. They did it
because it needed to be done and doing it brought a priceless kind
of esteem: the respect of their peers. Crafting the Net was a good
and noble work that still goes largely uncredited outside the
circle of peers who best understand what actually happened. Given
the importance of that work to the economy, it's a wonder these
guys don't have statues on Wall Street.

Now the stock market is going gaga over Linux for the same
reason it went gaga over the Net: it's good for business.
Why doesn't matter to the market. Putting
Linux to work is kind of like putting an e in
front of your idea or a .com after your company name. It's a grace.
A particularly lucrative grace, it now appears.

But just as the Big Boys didn't understand at first what that
.com truly meant, they don't understand what Linux and open source
mean, either. They thought the Net was just a 10-million-channel TV
with a keyboard instead of a remote control. Likewise, they think
Linux is just a 10-million-hacker version of Microsoft with bloated
attitude instead of bloated software.

Not that the “free software” community is especially
understanding about Business. Scott Lanning had this to say about
Linux Journal for a Seattle
Times story: “It's proprietary, so it means
nothing.”

Makes me wonder: how are we “proprietary”? In
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source
Revolution, Richard Stallman writes, “The `Linux'
magazines ... are filled with advertisements for proprietary
software that works with GNU/Linux. When the next Motif or Qt
appears, will magazines warn programmers to stay away from it, or
will they run ads for it?”

Well, probably both. Why shouldn't we give Troll Tech a way
to say good things about Qt tools? What's wrong with that?

Answering this question will, of course, bring up
blood-boiling moral questions which find their most concrete
expressions in licenses and copyrights (also copylefts) that are
strange and baffling to those who never heard of “open source” or
“free” software until confronted with the need to use it. What's
so “free” about something that comes with so many
restrictions—and with so many people who are quick to flame you
for breaking rules only they understand?

Business has a real demand for what Eric Raymond calls
“software that doesn't suck”, and for the people who make it.
Likewise, those people have a real demand for good development
tools. And not all of those tools are going to be free or open
source. Qt is an old example. The new example comes from Inprise
(formerly Borland, also known as Borland/Inprise).

This past July, Inprise ran a survey of developers visiting
various Linux sites including Linux Journal.
Of the 24,000 unique responses, about 6,000 called Linux their
primary development platform. Naturally, the leading development
tools for this group were gcc/egcs (47%) and Emacs with gcc/egcs
(27%). Yet a majority of these same 6,000 developers were willing
to pay for commercial Linux development tools: 27.9% said they
would be willing to pay $300 or less, and another 37.2% said they
would be willing to pay $100 or less. Only 21% said, “Nothing, it
must be free.”

What kind of tools did they want to buy? By class, the
favorites were “Rapid Application Development IDE (RAD, visual
development)” at 53.6%, and “traditional development IDE
(integrated editor, compiler, debugger)” at 35.7%. As for
particular tools, first choices were “C++Builder (C/C++ with
RAD)” with 29.6%, “New IDE that works with existing standard
Linux tools” with 24.2%, Delphi with 19.2%, and “Borland C++
(C/C++ without RAD)” with 13.3%.

Inprise has responded to demand with Kylix, described by
Michael Swindell, who heads the project for the company:

Kylix is the code name for a high-performance
native Linux development environment—a Rapid Application
Development environment—that will support C++ and Delphi
development. It's a major effort. We're developing a visual
component framework to radically speed and simplify native Linux
development. Graphical, database, GUI, Internet, multi-tier
development will all be completely visual and component-based,
using the Borland VCL and two-way tool technologies. Just like
Delphi and C++Builder for Windows. Its architecture is a component
abstraction directly over the native environment. It is derived
from the VCL architecture the current Delphi and C++Builder
products are based on, so the component APIs and methodologies will
be very similar. So familiar that if you already develop with
Delphi or C++Builder for Windows, it will be very easy to do Linux
development from day one. Essentially, you won't have to learn the
complex details of the underlying architectures, though they'll
still be completely accessible, making new Linux development much
faster and porting far easier.

Now here's the really tricky part, because it's cross-ethos
as well as cross-platform:

We are not developing Kylix as an open-source
project, but we are investigating which parts of Kylix lend
themselves to being open source. Right now, Kylix will allow
developers to create open-source applications. But we have not
determined which, if any, components in Kylix will be open source.
Our goal is to enable Kylix to develop both proprietary and
open-source applications, because there will be markets for
both.

As I write this (late September), Corel is getting beat up for
putting a proprietary boilerplate on the beta version of its new
Linux distribution. No doubt Inprise will run through a similar
gauntlet, all the way to the market. In fact, Swindell expects it:

This is a discovery stage that a new market has
to go through. You've got commercial vendors coming into the
open-source space, and open-source vendors moving into the
commercial space. It's a merging of very different business
practices. We will have to go through a lot of head scratching
before this settles out.

How will each model subvert the other? Consider the parting words
from Michael Swindell:

We need the extremes. These are the people
fighting for the noble causes. We can't discover open-source
standards and policies without them. And frankly, open-sourcing
everything is not a closed question for us. We'd welcome the Open
Source community's involvement in our own development. But we've
got fourteen years of intellectual property and patent
accumulation, plus legal and shareholder interests to protect.
There are extremes on that side, too. The best we can do right now
is answer the market and talk to everybody with an interest in
making this work.

The default assumption is that the most powerful
interest—shareholders—will want Inprise's source code to stay
closed. But it's not hard to imagine investor pressure on
traditional software companies to free their source code, just as
the same investors pressured .com companies to free their content.

Freedom is an efficiency that drives value. Isn't it fun to
watch this new software business teach Adam Smith's lesson, one
more time?

Doc Searls
is the Senior Editor
for Linux Journal. He can be reached at
doc@ssc.com.